Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The First Hobbit

The term "hobbit" was coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1937. He would later write, "On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why." The term seems to have just came to him one day.

Being a philologist, Tolkien soon "unearthed" the linguistic origin of the term -- this is the explanation he included in the appendix to The Return of the King:

Hobbit is an invention. In the Westron the word used, when the people was referred to at all, was banakil 'halfling.' But...the folk of the Shire and of Bree used the word kuduk...It seems likely that kuduk was a worn-down form of kûd-dûkan [='hole-dweller']. The latter I have translated...by holbytla ['hole-builder']; and hobbit provides a word that might well be a worn-down form of holbytla, if the name had occurred in our ancient language.

But there's more. Nearly 80 years earlier the term "hobbit" was in included in the list of local supernatural creatures from the north of England compiled by folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham.

Who I Am

Name: Sean /
Nationality: U.S.A. /
Creed: Catholic /
Philosophy: Gnomish wisdom for the most part; to the extent I’ve made a formal assessment, moderate realism /
Passions: Faith, family, country; Irish and English folk music; reading and literature; Tolkien trivia; travel /
Zodiac: Aries, Monkey, Gen-X /
Maps are tools for making sense of the world as it presents itself to the senses.
Keys give passage to the realm of knowledge and substance: they allow the mind to apprehend the workings behind what the senses detect.
Clocks, calendars, and the like point the way to time, numbers, infinity, universals, eternity, the absolute, the immeasurable, the never-ending. All three are products of minds capable of thought, memory, and imagination.
From sense to substance to permanence: because not everything is relative.